Ray Kurzweil’s Goal at Google is to enable true natural language understanding

Ray Kurzweil has explained that his project is to get the Google computers to understand natural language, not just do search and answer questions based on links and words, but actually understand the semantic content. That’s feasible now. To successfully do this will involve employing technologies that are already at Google like the Knowledge Graph, which has 700 million different concepts and billions of relationships between them. His team will also develop software as part of a system that will be “biological inspired” and can learn in a way analogous to the way the human brain is designed, that is, in a hierarchical structure.

According to Ray, natural language understanding is “the most important part of artificial intelligence. When Alan Turing defined the artificial intelligence field in 1950, he focused on natural language…if a computer can be indistinguishable from a human just in terms of written language communication, at least in his view, this was operating at the full range of human intelligence. I accept that view.”

Ray also provided more insight into how he ended up at Google in the first place, considering that he could have started yet another company but chose to become an employee of another company for the first time in his life. “Larry Page recruited me. I met with him about my book How To Create A Mind in July. I said I wanted to do a project and start a company based on these ideas. He convinced me to do it at Google because the resources I would need were uniquely at Google.” He added, ”The wisdom of Larry’s counsel has really deepened for me in the two months that I’ve been there.”

It’s clear that walking into a position at Google that allowed him to hit the ground running was appealing.

Google has been taking steps to make search more intelligent, which really means more human like. We’ve already seen the company take some big strides like the speech recognition of Google Voice and automatic translation of Google Translate, which could be made into a real-time process in the future with Google Glass headset. As these technologies are linked together into one system that can understand language at a deeper level, an exponential rise in understanding of language will likely follow.

Having Kurzweil at the helm of that development is likely to accelerate the development of this artificial intelligence, possibly even helping to scoop his own prediction that a computer would pass the Turing Test by 2029.

SOURCES – Singularity Hub, Youtube

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks